We’ve all worked with at least one. The co-workers that are just miserable to work with. You dread meetings with them, you fear you’ll be put on projects with them, and you get frustrated to no end when you are forced to deal with them. Some call them toxic employees. Having worked with a few myself over the years, I’d have to say that description is pretty accurate.

What’s a toxic employee? Someone who has no respect for the people he works with. He might ignore your emails, waste your time, or repeatedly not show up to meetings you invite him to. She might undermine your role on the team or overstep her bounds with regards to your work or your team. They hold grudges, act unprofessionally, and can be subordinate, rude, and condescending.

What do you do about these people? Most management experts tell you to work with these people, attempting to coach and mentor them toward being a better team player and respect their fellow employees. I agree that as a manager, you should do everything you can to guide those employees to be professional, valuable assets to the team, rather than liabilities. However, at some point, some people just don’t want to change. What do you do then?

It’s at this point that you must remove toxic employees from your organization.

Let me say that again.

You must remove the toxic employees from your organization.

It’s been my experience that the negative impact they have on the rest of your team for weeks and months far outweighs any technical skill or architectural brilliance they may have. Let’s take a look at what happens when you keep toxic employees in your environment:

• It absolutely kills the morale of your good employees. Working alongside someone who is unresponsive, rude, and disrespectful is exhausting. It takes a lot of additional time to get information from them. It requires multiple escalations to your manager and theirs in efforts to work together. When you’re already short-staffed, or constantly under the gun, adding extra pressure like this is a surefire way to get your good employees to burn out more quickly.

• It harms your credibility. If everyone around you can see what a problem this person is, and multiple people have talked to you about it, and you don’t do anything about the situation, or at least nothing visible, what do you think people are saying? They’re thinking you feel that one negative employee is worth more than the 5, 10, or 15 that are suffering due to the toxic employee’s behavior. Which puts you in the situation of low morale (see the point above). And that affects their belief in you as a leader and whether you’ll remove obstacles for them and help them work to their best advantage.

• It breeds gossip. If you’re going for an environment of transparency and openness, gossip is a huge detriment. People talking behind closed doors, or not being upfront with management, will turn your culture in a direction you don’t want it to go. Suspicion and information hoarding comes next, and no one wants to work like that.

• It affects your deliverables. If you’re shipping software, your release dates will be delayed due to the extra time needed for waiting on this employee to respond to emails or show up to meetings. If you’re writing documentation, the quality could be affected because you didn’t receive feedback during the documentation review from this employee.

• It does nothing for the toxic employee. If you truly care about developing your employees, you have to send the message that toxic behavior is not acceptable. It’s like raising children. If you never tell them no, they grow up expecting to get everything they want or ask for. If you never provide feedback that their toxic behavior is unacceptable, those employees never get the chance to improve.

How do you deal with toxic employees in your organization?